


Saint Anthony

by scarredsodeep



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Canon Compliant, F/F, Female Character of Color, Female James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Female Tony Stark, Femslash, Genderbending, Hurt/Comfort, Iron Man - Freeform, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, POV James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Paralysis, Post-Civil War (Marvel), The Avengers (Movie) - Freeform, war machine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-09 01:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11658636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things.About Rhodey losing Tony down the neck of a bottle. About Tony finding Rhodey broken on a battlefield. About Rhodey and Tony finding each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One of the best conversations we had last weekend at SDCC was about the tendency of fandom, and white media in general, not to grant interiority to characters of color. So, here is a window to Rhodey's interior. I hope you like it! I need so much more femslash in my life.
> 
> Part 1 of 2.

Tony’s been lost before, but not like this.

The funny thing is, when you lost her in the desert, you never despaired. Oh, you knew what kinds of things happen to women in the desert—American women with big mouths in the hands of violent extremists, specifically. You knew the risks, dreamed a new worst case scenario each night, woke up each morning sweaty and sour. You expected to find her less than whole, damaged in ways you could hardly imagine. You’d been a woman in the desert yourself, once. Shot down behind enemy lines, American, with a big mouth. So maybe you could imagine some things.

The difference is that then, you’d _expected to find her_. And you had. You pulled her out of the sand yourself. Singed and bloody and whipped raw by sand, into your arms she’d fallen. Your arms. Your Tony.

Anthony is the patron saint of lost things, so you meet your own tired eyes in the mirror and cross yourself. Prayer is for when all else fails, that’s what Momma taught you. “Tony, Tony, turn around, what is lost may now be found,” you murmur to your reflection. It’s been a long time since you’ve been to church.

You strip out of your clothes slowly, your battered body protesting with each motion. You press your ribs tentatively, palming the ache just below your breasts. The response is sharp, jolting. Cracked, you think. Not life-threatening. A problem for the Jamie Rhodes of tomorrow.

Your skin, already dark, has gone blue-black with bruises. Blood beneath the skin. A flood of it. You’ve had worse, you surmise, scanning yourself in the full-length mirror. Without the armor suit, you’d be dead.

Without the goddamned armor suit, none of this would ever have happened. But how can you be but grateful to it, when it’s the thing that saved Tony?

Your Tony. Once.

It was her birthday, tonight. This is not how you thought you’d be spending it. You ease gingerly under the hot spray of your showerhead. You can’t be sure—things between the two of you have always been volatile—but you may have broken up tonight. If you were even together. If you’ve ever been. If the way you just fucking tried to _destroy_ each other is any indication.

You tip your head back under the water, letting it flow down your throat and chest. Like rain on your eyelids, falling heat on your lips. You let the water hit you. You think of anything but the precise, engineer’s delicacy of Tony’s fingertips on that same skin.

Or is it, even? Everything is different now. Since.

Maybe it would’ve been better, cleaner, to lose her in the desert after all. Instead of down the neck of a bottle. The last night the two of you spent together is bitter in your mouth, brittle in your hands, sand through your fingers. It tastes of finality, now. Of endings.

Funny how you never know a last thing while it’s happening. You try to remember—did you stay the night? Please, let you have fallen asleep in that big bed, in those soft sheets, nestling into her, your bodies tangled. Los Angeles gleaming at you out the window, bright as the moon and stars caught in the sea. Please, let it have been one of your beautiful nights. Let you have spent it beside her.

There—yes—the memory clarifies. You see yourself sitting on the edge of the bed, half-naked and lacing up boots. The stiffness of duty back in your shoulders. You see Tony, pale in the darkness, soft-eyed and dappled in cosmic light, lying on her back, looking mournful. Save for the smirk she can’t quite hide. From space suns never set, just travel round and round the skies. Tony’s smirk is like that. The joy’s always quick in her, even when things are serious. Even when things hurt. The joy is always sharp.

“Stay,” you remember her saying. Same entreaty as always, one that asks, almost. To you, Tony will always be moonlight, glimmering just out of reach. Asking but not asking. Serious as any of her jokes.

Stay, she said.

Of course you left.

There was a time when you were young. When you thought about doing this for real, in public, out loud. But there was your career to think about. Higher ranking, more decorated soldiers than you lost their commissions for things like this. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ meant you could have one or the other—the girl or the job—but not both. And all you’d ever wanted was to be a pilot. Sure, Tony could have bought you a plane. But you didn’t graduate top of your class from the Air Force Academy to be a kept woman, a commercial pilot. Excellence, honor, achievement, _independence_. Those were the principles by which you wound your heart. You couldn’t set them aside.

And Tony—Tony didn’t ask you to.

 _Get the girl_. Well, what if the girl isn’t the type to be gotten? What if the girl is quicksilver moonlight, a thing whose beauty you’d spoil by trying to pin in place. How could you walk away from your dreams for that?

And: wasn’t that its own kind of dream?

The older you got, the less sure of her you became. By the time DADT was repealed, by the time you could have loved her in public—it was different between you than it had been when you were kids. _You_ were different. You’d been to war, for fuck’s sake. You’d been a prisoner of it. Penny-bright you were no longer. Tony was different too.

Better to think of her the way she was when you met, at a Stark weaponry demonstration your AFA class had attended at a test facility in the desert. So many years ago, now. She’d been tiny, fierce-faced and not 120 pounds soaking wet. She’d worn dark glasses and stood back from her father’s hip, like a bodyguard and not a daughter. You’d had the vague sense she was some kind of intern or aid. Howard had spoken about the weapons development process, Stark’s military contracts. Even with her eyes covered, you got the sense Tony was rolling her eyes. She wore all black, her chin-length hair tangled and slept-on.

You knew when she noticed you because the glasses came off. She watched you so openly, so brazenly. You felt pinned in place by her gaze. You watched her too. When the tour group moved on, she fell to the back of it. You can’t say what made you break rank and fall back too.

“I could build a smarter missile in my sleep,” she told you, when you were walking together at the very back of the group. She didn’t say it like she was bragging, didn’t say it with the smirking bravado she’d become known for later in life. It’s the first thing she ever said to you. “But Howard says you can’t give ignorant jarheads more than they’re ready for, or every tyrant and warlord the world round will have one too. Wars moves on our orders, he says. A careless design starts an arms race. But I think smart enough weapons would _end_ war. I think it’s our responsibility to do that if we can. What do you think?”

And she turned to you, brown eyes burning, chin jutted out defiant, a sharp tongue behind the softest lips you’d ever seen. She was so lovely, she was hard to look at. She made your skin burn. You couldn’t have met her eyes at all, if she hadn’t made you angry.

“We’re the United States Air Force,” you said back. “We’re not _ignorant jarheads_.”

“You’re cadets,” she said. “Technically.”

“And you don’t look old enough to have a _driver’s license_.” Your voice held heat in place of the discipline you’d learn later, when you really became a soldier instead of just playing at one.

Tony raised one suggestive eyebrow. “Oh, do please tell me what I’m old enough for, G.I. Jane.” You didn’t know, then, that she was well on her way to graduating from MIT at 17, that she already had DoD contracts queued up waiting for her to reach the age of majority. You didn’t know what kind of experiences her years at a girls’ boarding school in Europe had entailed.

You would learn, though.

“Our responsibility is to uphold peace, however possible,” you rushed on. Your cheeks were so hot you barely took time to notice she was flirting. “I want whatever weapons help us do that. Like Mr. Stark said—‘peace means having a bigger stick,’ right?”

“And that doesn’t seem like a contradiction to you?” she pressed, a fey light to her eyes. You remember frowning. You were in your second year at the Academy. She _didn’t_ have a driver’s license. And she was asking you to think in a way that no one else ever had, with this expectation on her face—like whatever you said would be intelligent and worth listening to. You were a poor kid from South Philly. Everything you ever had was given out of pity, or grudgingly, against all odds, earned. No one back home or at school thought you’d make it. There weren’t a lot of high-ranking black women in the Air Force. But Tony—she looked at you like it was a _given_. Like you deserved to stand where you stood without question. Like you were equals.

Your cheeks burned under the heat of her gaze. A slow uncurling of something long clenched drew you to her. More than anything you’d ever wanted, you found yourself wanting to take her hand.

“The only reason people don’t just do whatever they want all the time is the threat of consequences,” you told her. You were taking psych, learning about Kohlberg’s moral reasoning; you spoke with the robust confidence of a young person with very little real-world experience. You named out loud all that kept her hand out of yours. “That’s why peacekeepers need to be prepared to deliver consequences.”

She’d leaned closer, like your mouth was just as strong a magnet as hers. Under your uniform, you were sweating. Being too close to Tony was indistinguishable from seasickness. From falling from a great height. From being on fire.

“Don’t you believe people want to be good?” she asked.

“I think people want to be very, very bad,” you croaked. You were hoarse. You were dizzy. You wanted her. The tour had moved into the next room; you’d fallen behind. You were alone on the ballistics factory floor, which now seems like too shrewd a metaphor for all that came after. You thought this intense, sexy woman was going to kiss you, and you were barely breathing.

“Rhodes!” your sergeant barked sharply, splintering the moment so thoroughly you may as well have imagined it. You jumped to attention, your dark complexion the only grace saving you from your near-fatal blush. “You want disciplinary action for dereliction?”

It was instantly sobering. Your record was spotless, your transcript perfect. Not just in the Academy, but for your entire life. Your scholarship, your career, depended on it staying that way. There were a lot of people who would try to keep a queer black woman from becoming a combat pilot. You could not afford to give them any reasons.

“Sir, no sir!” you snapped back, cursing the shake in your voice as you did.

“Explain yourself, Cadet.”

Your thoughts raced, coming upon nothing but empty excuses. That’s when Tony spoke up, her voice as proud as it was bored. “I kept her,” she said. “I had questions about the life of an Air Force cadet.”

The sergeant, bulky-shouldered and overbearing a moment ago, snapped into a posture of deference and respect. “The USAF would be lucky to have you, Miss Stark,” he said. “If you ever want a tour of our campus—”

Stupid as you were back then, that was the first time you realized who you were talking to.

“Maybe if MIT gets boring,” she said. She didn’t sound impressed. “Thank you for the offer, Sarge. And thanks for the info, Rhodes. I’ll be in touch if I have any more… questions.”

You and your sergeant were left nodding dumbly. She sauntered off to catch up with _her father, Howard Stark_ , her tablet of equations and blueprints held to her skinny chest.

The next time you heard from her was when the blueprint of the most advanced computerized missile you’d ever seen arrived in your government email inbox. You’d have needed an engineering degree to even understand what you were seeing. One thing was clear on the diagram, though: she’d named it The Peacekeeper.

She’d designed it for you.

You spent your first night together a few weeks later.

You snap back to the present when the water hitting your face transitions from lukewarm to subarctic. The hot must have run out ages ago. You turn off the faucet and get out of the shower, your braids cold on your back while you wrap up in a towel.

You didn’t stay. Your last night together? You wanted to be fresh for duty the next morning, you wanted to sleep in your own bed. Reasons, excuses, whatever. You didn’t stay.

You squeeze water out of your hair and put on clean pajamas. You pour yourself a drink, wincing at the strain on your shoulder, and try not to think of Tony drinking furiously, drinking like a deathwish, drinking to blot herself out, and then endangering a whole party full of people. Superpowered, drunk. So, so reckless. Sharp as she ever was and then sharper.

You try not to think of how you endangered them too, so angry that all you were thinking of was putting her down, dropping her as painfully as possible.

You curl up in an armchair across from the war machine you left in your living room. Its blank eyes stare back. You try not to think of anything at all.

You fail. Of course you do. Your head fills with the memory of her, of the night you spent together at the Embassy after she’d escaped from the cave. Out there in the blazing desert, you were an oasis to her. She didn’t want to sleep alone, so you made a pallet at the foot of her bed.

“I’ll be right here,” you promised her. You had your service weapon. You didn’t want her to see how jittery you were. Your palms were damp and cold.

“That’s way too far,” she said. No bluster, just loneliness. How small and vulnerable she’d been that night. “Get in my bed, Rhodes.”

You’d made up your mind already, that she was too damaged for this. That there would be no sex til she had a full psych eval and time to process her trauma.

But god, you _missed_ her. You were so afraid, for so long. And: you never doubted you’d find her. You never doubted your reunion.

How you’d been longing for it.

You got in her bed.

She was small, bony as a sparrow that night, chilled to the touch despite the swelter of the night, underfed for months. She curled into your chest so gratefully. Her body shook, scraped and bruised and incongruently sweet-smelling from her long bath. Three tubs full of water before she was clean—three tubs in the desert. You’d have carried her to the sea personally, that night, if that had been what she needed. But three tubs was enough. Three til the water ran clear.

Her fingernails were still lined with grime.

The strange new light from the thing in her chest illuminated in the room in a way you were not used to. You’ve spent enough nights with her over the years for most things to be familiar, but not this. It’s eerie.

“Did they… do this to you?” you asked. It was hard to say the words.

Tony turned in your arms, the arc reactor pulsing soft blue light through her Metallica t-shirt. She touched it unconsciously, rubbed her fingers over the metal lump like a touchstone.

“I did,” she said. “And Yinsen. It saved my life. Do you want to see it?”

You knew what would happen if you let Tony take off her shirt. You _knew_. You let her do it anyway. Tony has that effect on you. Besides—you _did_ want to see it.

The way she looked that night, her hair long and wild around her head, naked but for cotton underpants, the gruesome blue glow in her chest spilling out, painting her pale breasts with an underwater light. Her nipples, usually large on small breasts, were hard; she trembled. She looked at you, into you, and her eyes were hungry.

Her mouth, her hands—they were hungrier. She straddled your hips, settling her startling lightness atop you. She lifted your hand from the mattress and used it to trace the arc reactor, her collarbones, her nipples, her throat. She stared at you like she had seen across universes. The thousand light-year stare.

“I need a good memory, Rhodey,” she said. She rocked her hips ever so slightly. Asking, almost. You moaned without meaning to, made of ache. An answer. Almost.

“You’re not ready,” you managed. “Trauma,” you added insensibly. “You could be traumatized.” Your entire body was afire with relief she was alive, mostly whole, had come back. Your body was afire with the wanting. More than that, the _need_. To know she was real, vital, alive. To _feel_ it.

“I’m definitely traumatized,” she said with a black little laugh. “And I need you.”

She took your hand and put it between her legs. She was already wet. When she leaned down and kissed you, you didn’t argue. You kissed back.

That night is a long way from your living room, where you sip your drink and stare down the suit. You haven’t stolen it, not yet. What you do next will be stealing, no matter what you choose.

You’ve got your orders. Bring the suit to base, with Stark’s blessing or without. Tony—Tony is gone. How long has she been disappearing inside herself? Tonight was not the first warning sign. There were a hundred you ignored. Five hundred. A thousand. What you saw tonight was just… the last few grains of sand choking through the neck of the hourglass, lost like the rest of time.

So why does it hurt so much?

Tony can’t handle the suit. If she’d been the only one suited tonight, someone could have _died_. She made the choice for you. Your whole career, when have you ever disobeyed an order? Ever broken rank? There is no choice. You have no choice.

You stare into the eyes of the War Machine, and you try to believe it.

Tonight wasn’t Tony going off like a grenade, all at once. Tonight was just one destruction in a long string of them, the final act in a long stage play about devastation. When was the last time you saw her sober, even? When was the last time her mouth tasted of anything but whiskey, vodka, gin?

What does she taste like? What did she used to? Even her sweat is 80 proof, these days. Every part of her stings your tongue.

When Howard died. When she lost Howard and Maria at once, when she went to bed a sullen teen and woke up an orphan—a lesser woman might have been eclipsed by that grief. Any number of family friends and hangers-on and celebrities and fellow geniuses available as shoulders to cry on, and Tony called you. You were up in the mountains, on campus in Colorado, preparing for final exams. You hadn’t heard the news. Her choking, unaspirated sobs on the phone—that was how you knew.

You’d spent the past summer together, inseparable, left mostly to your own devices in one of the family’s cabanas on a Mexican beach. You’d seen Howard once the whole summer. You’d been standing in the kitchen eating a frozen waffle with your hands, dressed in Tony’s _Girls Gone Wild_ t-shirt, just long enough to brush the tops of your thighs, not quite concealing the fact that you were only wearing underwear. The one and only time you met Howard Stark, and you didn’t have a bra on. You weren’t wearing _pants_. You kept your hair cut close then, a style somewhere between a crew cut and a fade, but you were gripped by the conviction anyway that you had sex hair, that Howard could tell just by looking at your guilty face and sweaty skin and kinky buzz that you’d spent all night halfway between here and fucking Valhalla, that you’d swapped sleep for the pleasure of again, again, and again, making his only daughter come.

“Sleep well?” he said.

Mouth full of waffle, you replied, “Uh-huh.”

Now it was winter, and the man was dead.

Tony spent that Christmas holed up in your dorm room, violating every rule the Academy ever instated, dismantling your hot plate and hair iron to make weird little robots that inched pointlessly across your desk, insistently offering paperclips and post-its to any object they encountered. She turned your electric pencil sharpener into a music box. She made your desk lamp into something you could neither identify nor use as a source of light, a little bot on treads that fried your African violet in what seemed a deliberate act of aggression. She turned so completely inside herself that she stopped speaking to anyone, even you. She didn’t cry, not in the daylight. She didn’t take anyone’s calls. She flinched from you while the sun was up, and in moonlight crawled into your bed, into your arms, and wept on your chest.

You got very drunk together for New Year’s, bundled up against the Colorado cold and hiked a ways up the Broadmoor. You drank til you were dazzling and brittle as the frozen waterfalls. It wasn’t like you, to break the rules. Tony wasn’t like you. Tony made you other than yourself. Tony made you not mind it.

“A few months and you graduate,” she said. She could speak again: the moon was up, and she was under it. Maybe she was under a witch’s curse that stole her words in sunlight. Maybe that’s all grief is. “What’s then? Next, I mean. What’s next?”

Used to be, when Tony was drunk, you could tell other than by tasting. You heard and saw it too. She flushed so prettily. Her quick, clever hands took to fluttering. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. You never could.

“Lieutenant Rhodes,” you said. The words were light and thick at once, same as the snow on the ground around you. They fell like prophecy, crunchy as rime. “Active duty. My whole future. I _fly_ , Tony. They put me in the skies and I blow everyone away.”

“ _I_ can’t fly,” she said. Her eyes were coals, hard and flint and begging to burn. Her breath fogged the air and you bit at the clouds of it, laughing, like you could take in all of her. Like there wasn’t a part of her you couldn’t fit in your mouth, hold inside yourself and save forever.

“Could if you wanted to,” you replied, lazy and langorous. She could do anything she wanted to. You knew it then like you know it now. You were warm with liquor, not used to drinking. You didn’t feel the cold. Laughing, you rolled in the snow. You tried to pull her with you, tried to together make malformed angels, but she stayed stiff.  A few nights ago she’d told you that her family paid the stewardess on their private jet more than you’ll make as a second lieutenant. You don’t think she meant anything by it. She just thought you ought to know.

“So you’ll fly away from me, then? To a combat zone. To Afghanistan. To _die_.”

On your back in the snow, the only thing between you and the stars the freezing water vapor of your own exhalation, it was easy to tell her, “I won’t die.”

Her eyes so hard, so sharp. She said, “Anyone can die.”

Tonight in your living room, you stare the ugly thing in the eye. You drink in gulps, not sips. This is unlike you. All of this is so unlike you.

She made it for you. The war machine. She meant it for you. Your voice command activated it, your birthdate unlocked it. To steal from Tony is to steal from yourself. But that’s the thing, isn’t it: you’ve been handing yourself over, piece by piece, to the USAF all along. As if they owned you. As if you wanted to be owned. As if you could trade yourself for the skies.

As if the Air Force was the only way you could fly.

Think, Rhodes. Who do you honor, who do you protect, by keeping this ugly machine in your living room like an effigy of Quixote? Who do you serve if you take it back to whatever’s left of Tony’s house. If you crawl back inside the hot metal womb of it and go after her, find her, put her in a headlock, and force her to come home. You know now that you can find her without really finding her. You know now that you can peel her out of her suit like a royal red, twist off her metal mask to get to the sweetness inside, and still she’ll be lost. Still she’ll be far from you.

A few weeks ago, she called from Monaco to tell you, “Rhodey, I’ve been thinking about time.” She was there for the Grand Prix, a beautiful redhead on each arm. You could never tell anymore whether she’d been drinking, but it usually safe to assume that if she was calling you, she wasn’t sober. You weren’t jealous. You told yourself this again and again. You didn’t want what Tony had. That’s why you turned it down when she offered it to you.

It had been years since she last offered it to you. It’s always the way with last times that you don’t know it til it’s gone. You wonder who she opens and offers her life to now, but you know the answer. She opens to no one. She is closed up in a suit of armor always, whether she’s Iron Man or not.

“You thinking about what time it is in California?” you asked. “Because the answer is 3am.”

“I’m thinking I don’t have much of it,” she said. The noises in the background of the call were bigger, closer, more real than you’d imagined, watching races on TV. It didn’t sound like she was in her private viewing box. It sounded like she was down in the pit, the engines revving right beside her. This did not surprise you. Tony would be elbow-deep in anything mechanical she could reach. Fast cars were an especial weakness. _Fast cars and slow women_ , she used to tell you, her face full of that shit-eating grin. The joke was that you were careful, cautious, slow. The joke was that she was reckless, burning herself from both ends, always so brilliant, so fucking sharp. She was fast when you were slow.

You made a good match, once.

“I’m gonna race,” she said then.

“What? _Now_?”

“Why not? It’s my race car. It’s got my name all over it.” Maybe it was long-distance, that strangeness to her voice. Maybe it was how groggy you were. Maybe it was whatever she was drinking.

“You can’t just race in the Grand Prix, Tony.”

“You’re supposed to tell me I can do anything.” There it was again, that quality to her voice. You couldn’t place it. You believed she could do anything, you always did. You didn’t say it.

You said, “Did I mention it was 3am?”

“You’re the one who picked up the phone,” she said. “Rhodey? You know I love you. Don’t you?”

You did and you didn’t. It’s only gotten more confusing now. You wish you’d said it back. What would it have cost you, to tell her the truth? She already knew it. Instead you said, “Goodnight, Tony.” And you hung up the phone.

Who betrayed who, really? Who’s the thief and who’s the lost thing? Who slipped through the other’s fingers first, fastest, hardest, best?

Your glass is empty. The war machine is hollow as your heart. One more memory aches at you, in the tumble of loss and love and longing that is Antonia Stark. Tony. Your Tony.

Your Tony when she was young, bright, blazing. Her hand on the door leading into a ballroom, a fundraising gala she’d coaxed you into attending with her. Bribed you, really. She was making a large donation to benefit combat Vets, a cause you have always been a sucker for. You were freshly back from your first deployment. Shore leave, and you’d wanted to spend every minute of it with her. You were wearing tangerine, a fiery orange dress of slashed silk and bared skin. You’d wanted to wear your dress uniform. She’d disagreed. You remember the way she paused, looking back over her shoulder, her gaze heavy as velvet, dragging, drowning, drawing your eyes.

“Don’t bail on me now, Rhodes,” she said. Her mouth bowed prettily, her smirk hovering around its lipstick edges. “You’re my whole family now. You have to take care of me. Balance me out.” She extended her other hand back to you, hanging off her long and elegant arm. She was dressed in darkest blue, a collar of citrine and labradorite burning at her throat. “No one ever stops me but you,” she murmured, the look on her face unguarded and asking, almost. “Sometimes I need to be stopped.”

You took her hand.

_Tony, Tony._

You spend the night staring down the war machine.

 _Turn around_.

In the morning you climb inside.

You wall yourself up inside of it. You can see after one night how it’s a fortress. How remote it renders the rest of the world. You feel safe, inside. You feel lonely. You feel itchy, like you’d like to chew your way out. You feel, too, how hard it will be to take it off again—how naked you’ll be. How anchored to the earth. How powerless, how small.

_What is lost…_

In the war machine, you can fly. It is not a choice, not really. You set the coordinates of the Air Force base in the nav system. Maybe if Tony were here, things would be different. Sometimes _you_ need to be stopped.

But Tony’s not here to stop you. Tony is lost.

_…can now be found._

You fly the war machine to your commander. You open it up at Justin Hammer’s feet. You slink away to lick your wounds like this is called duty. It hurts so much more than you expected, handing over this suit she built to wrap around you. Like wrenching yourself out of her arms.

As soon as your feet touch the ground, you mourn the sky.


	2. Chapter 2

_Six Years Later_

 

The last thing you remember is flying. Your body, buffeted up on the air, the chaos and combat around you fading to almost nothing—all these years airborne and still, the sky takes your breath away—and then, nothing.

You wake up broken.

The pain is not the scary part. The _absence_ is. The things you cannot feel.

Your legs. You can’t feel your legs.

Darkness.

 

The next time you wake, the world is white. You’re in a tube. Soft and small, a hand on yours. Your spine is a column of lava, flowing like feeling. There is pain and then there is something past it.

“Sleep,” a voice says. Her voice. Cramped and flat, but hers.

You’re the lost one now.

Your eyes close.

 

You dream of Tony. It’s a dream or it’s a memory. You float on a sea of pain and haze and that something-missing.

You’re standing— _standing_ —in your bedroom. In the room that was your bedroom ten years ago. In front of you is the hot-rod-red-and-gold suit of armor you saw for the first time today through one of your pilots’ targeting screens. The mask flips open, Tony’s face edged in red, grinning.

“I can fly now,” she says. “I shot for the moon, Rhodey. Til my armor turned to ice and I fell from the sky. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to go up and up forever. I never wanted to come back to earth. Is that how you feel, flying?”

You cross the room to her, your legs responding with less than a thought, your feet knowing the way without your telling them to move. You raise a hand, tentative and then bolder; you touch the armor. It is cool. You trace the plates of it, running your fingers over her smooth metal chest, the arc reactor glow. She gave it pectorals. A robot with pecs—of course she did. You’re surprised she didn’t give it a giant scarlet codpiece. You touch her with reverence, with wonder.

You touch the suit. She doesn’t feel it.

You don’t think about what you don’t feel.

“I get it,” she says. “I get why it’s so important to you, flygirl. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“It’s really you in there,” you say.

A cold iron hand reaches out, lifts your chin. Tony creaks and clanks towards you, a piece of heavy machinery instead of a woman.

“You can call me Iron Man,” she laughs. Then she leans in, kisses you. Her cold metal faceplate knocks against your chin.

You feel it all.

 

No—you weren’t flying.

You were falling.

 

You know you’re awake because dreams don’t hurt. Not like this.

You know you’re awake because your legs work in your dreams.

You know you’re awake because in your dreams, Tony kisses you.

You open your eyes. Her face is pale, drawn, _old_. Her eyes spark with tears. Her hand is not metal, not cold. “Rhodey,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

You would rather dream.

 

Five surgeries, she tells you. Five times under the knives of the best neurosurgeons money can buy. You’re the wet dream of a neurorobotics lab. What it feels like is a bitter, sparking knot, a nest, a web of wires. An electrical fire. You can feel it. You can feel the low, slow burn arcing through the scars.

You understand you should be grateful to feel anything at all.

Tony stands five feet from you, on the other side of the rehab rails. Your legs are strapped up with Starktech, glowing blue as Tony’s chest used to, giving you one hydraulic inch of movement at a time. Your legs. Your legs aren’t listening to your brain anymore. Some cords, cut, stay severed. But the tech can hear you. The tech is listening.

Inch by inch, then. Step by step. You move towards her.

You never thought you’d be so relieved to feel your feet on the ground.

 

It’s never been her caring for you. Of the two of you, you were never the one who needed rehab. One hundred and thirty-eight combat missions, you never got hurt like this. It’s never been like this before—it’s never been Tony, taking care of you.

You remember a young, skinny thing, ribs like to punch out the skin of her back, curled around a toilet bowl. Naked except for one of your white tank tops, ribbed fabric clinging to her pale, pale skin. Her eyes leaked tears, her mouth wet and stringy with saliva. She spit into the toilet bowl again and again. When she vomited, her whole body arched, going taut like a cat’s.

You rubbed her back. You brought cups of water, saltine crackers, cool cloths for her neck. You braided her hair, long and loose down her back. You rinsed out her clothes in the sink, squeezing out the champagne-smelling bile. Under your touch, under your care, she moaned to the porcelain. “I’m so sorry. Rhodey, I’m so sorry.” Her ass was bare, her white thighs spreading on the tile. Her curling black pubic hairs preserving only a little modesty. Through the undershirt, her large dark nipples plainly visible. Her sick-sweaty arms bore goosebumps. She shivered and shook. Even then you wanted her.

That was the first night you stayed up with her, playing nurse, but not the last. With time she would grow ever more adept at poisoning herself. At a certain point, she would either stop spending those heaving, toxic nights, on the bathroom floor, or she would stop calling you to stand vigil with her. Or maybe it was that you stopped answering her calls. It’s hard to remember, now. That was so many years ago.

It’s what you think of, when she says to you _I’m so sorry_. You think of small, pale Tony, with puke on her breath and bags under her eyes, emptying her insides into your toilet bowl.

It’s never been her caring for you before. You’re used to it being the other way around.

 

Or, no. Is that true? You are so muddled. There’s so much pain. When you take off the Starktech leg sheaths, you feel nothing at all. From mid-thigh downwards, there is nothing.

You’ve taken to sleeping in the leg sheaths. Tony isn’t stopping you. Tony’s slept in a suit before, to feel safe. To feel in control. She understands you. Her face has been bruised and bloody for weeks, it seems like. She’s been at war. You fought beside her. You’ve always fought beside her.

When you came home from war. From _the_ war. When Tony leaned on the executive branch of the U.S. fucking government to broker the deal that brought you home. When Tony got you out of that godforsaken prisoner of war camp in the Saudi sands. When Tony brought you home from the desert. You laid beside her in bed and fought.

Your dreams were a reliving. Your heart was a bruising thing. You were scared, always. Your veins ran with pure cortisol. You’d had enough of blood. You got in her bed and you fought beside her. She cared for you then. She smoothed you out again.

Tony, though. When it was her turn. She didn’t recover naturally from what she’d lived through. Somewhere deep inside herself, she got stuck. Maybe she could have shaken off her time as a captive in the caves, the torture and abuse she suffered there. Maybe she could have _just gotten over_ the betrayal by Obadiah, her father figure trying to kill her. Maybe she could have recovered from Ivan Vanko’s attempts to murder her and half the attendees of the Stark Expo. Maybe she could have faced death and not just lived, but laughed at it, and taken all this in stride—

But what she saw in the wormhole changed her. She didn’t come back from space, not really. She was still there. She spent every day in space, unable to find her way home.

Anthony, patron saint of the lost.

How to describe the brashness of Tony traumatized? The arrogance, the bravado, the jokes. The jitters. The panic attacks. The panic attacks that sent her fleeing back into her suits. Without alcohol to keep the nightmares at bay, she just… stopped sleeping. You’d seen it in your soldiers. In yourself. Unlike your soldiers, when Tony wasn’t sleeping, she had the billions and the brains to build an armory. She churned out suit after suit. For every crisis or creature or conflict she could imagine—and a brain like that, oh, there was no shortage of creativity—for every nightmare, there was a suit. She was a tinkerer. A mechanic.

An Iron Man, with no trace of the human woman she’d been remaining. She built herself into her fortress, brick by brick, suit by suit. She did not leave herself a way out.

 

When Tony got sober, you thought she’d come back to you. You were wrong.

“I thought I was dying, Rhodes,” she told you, a day or a week or a month after that birthday party. After the night you lost her. “It was… clarifying. I realized there are things I want that I can’t get from you.”

 _I’d give you anything_ , you’d say if it was a movie. But it’s not, and you won’t: you both know it. All the things she’s never asked for form a perfect map for all the things you cannot, or will not, give.

So you watch Pepper step into the role you used to fill. You smile. You say things like “I’m happy for you.” And you are. Almost.

These days, you take what you can get. Sometimes it’s more than others.

A knock on your door, not long before shit went down with the Mandarin—a heavy knock, the kind made by a metal gauntlet. Only one woman you knew with metal fists. “I’m here to tattoo an American flag on some chick’s ass?” she called through the door. “Complimentary bald eagle delivery for some dickhead called Iron Patriot!”

“Who is this?” you called back, playing your part in the running gag.

“It’s me, Colonel Rhodes. It’s Tony. Open up.”

_Rhodey, Rhodey, turn around._

Somehow, she made it look sexy. The suit, slim-lined, silver and gold. A giant fucking armored robot with glowing eyes, a facial slit, a man’s physique. She leaned against your doorframe, her iron hip canted just so, You could feel your heartbeat in your fingertips, it was racing so hard. You tried to keep your voice steady, tried to keep it a joke. You didn’t want to spook her. You didn’t want to spook yourself.

Colonel Rhodes, Iron Patriot, War Machine. You didn’t earn those titles by fucking Tony Stark. You earned them through the four points on your compass, the things that always drove you: excellence, honor, achievement, independence. But god, that doesn’t mean you didn’t want to fuck her now.

“You didn’t have to dress up for me,” you laughed. You were still dressed from work, your dress blues buttoned up to the throat. She made metal look more comfortable, more relaxed.

She was anything but relaxed.

She sat on your couch casually, heels tucked up under her like a young girl, not a living weapon. “How long since you’ve been out of that thing?” you asked. You perched on the edge of a chair, not wanting to add your weight to a couch already groaning with iron.

“I feel like that’s a trick question,” Tony said back. “It’s got a hygiene system. It’s not that gross.”

“Lift the face mask, at least. Let me hear your real voice. Let me see your eyes.”

“Are you seducing me, Colonel Rhodes?” she asked in her distorted Iron Voice. You both knew perfectly well she’d come here to seduce you. It’s not something you talked about. You couldn’t. She was with Pepper, now. Pepper who could give her what you could not. And, sometimes, she was here. With you. “Because if you think I’m going to fuck someone who calls herself _Iron Patriot_ …”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It _is_ that bad. A list of things that it’s not: subtle. Tasteful. Sexy. Better than War Machine—”

On second thought, you didn’t want to be sitting down. You walked over to her, rapped on the forehead of her face mask. Her eyes glowed up at you. There were so many suits, so many skins she might wear at any moment. You knew she’d be in this one, though. In person. There was nothing she’d have come here to do that she wouldn’t want to do in person.

What was sex, but another way to light her circuits afire? To keep the nightmares at bay. Pepper deserved better, probably. But who were you to tell her not to?

It was you. It was Tony. You were in the business of taking what you could get.

You weren’t the one who stopped her anymore.

 “I’ll make you a deal,” you said. You brought your hand to the buttons of your high collar. “You power down and so do I. You strip, I strip.”

As a show of good faith, you undid your top button. The mask stared blankly back at you, unreadable. “You said you liked it when I did you in the suit,” she said.

“I’m still not sure I don’t regret that. In fact, yes, it’s official, I regret it. Pop the mask and I’ll do another button,” you promised, coaxing and cajoling and wanting and worrying all at once.

It worked. Her whole helmet for your jacket, your stripes of rank, your medals, your epaulets. Her face was in there after all, soft and wild, the sleepless rings around her eyes like bruises. Unless they were bruises. It was dark in your living room. It was always dark when Tony came around. You both preferred her in moonlight. The chest piece, the back, she traded for your dress shirt, your bra. Your pants, her armored legs. ( _Legs._ Don’t think about legs.) You stood before her in your panties and she panted and shook, loose-limbed and weak without the reinforcement of the suit. She was sweating, fearful. You could smell it.

She still had her gauntlets on. She moved to touch you, to hold you in those cold, unfeeling hands. She couldn’t quite disarm herself. You stepped back. You needed her to stand down, all the way down. It was important.

“You are _not_ putting anything with a repulsor inside of me. New rule. No exceptions. Gloves off if you want to get off,” you told her.

“Tell me you’re not freestyling now,” she joked. Neither of you were laughing. She bit her lip, looking so unbelievably haunted. Her voice quiet, she asked, “Can I keep one?”

Gently, you reached out and took her heavy metal hand. “Take it off,” you said softly. Her slender hand was so big in the gauntlet, it took both of yours to hold it. “We’ll put it on the table, okay? It will be right there. Within arm’s reach. A second away.”

She kept gnawing her lip, looking from her glowing, armored palms to the generous slopes and plains of your unclad body. What would you say, what could you possibly say?

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” you said. It was true at the same time it was a lie. You were just one woman, Iron Patriot or not. You didn’t get to decide what happened to her. You couldn’t keep her any safer than she could. The world was full of peril. You lived in it anyway. It was all you could do.

(It got you in the suit. Again and again, it got you in the suit. It got you shot out of the fucking sky. It got you here, on the ground, with legs you can’t—with legs—)

“Tony? Tony. You’re safe. With me, you’re safe.”

“Think you’re a big badass,” she mumbled, trying to laugh, trying to cover how _scared_ she was, easing off that last glove. “Give a girl a shoulder-mounted machine gun and all of a sudden she thinks she’s hot shit. Listen, Rambo—”

You kissed the next words out of her mouth. Her hand, softer than ever once freed from the armor, went right for the waistband of your underwear. You kissed harder, easing her back onto the couch, pushing her prone.

And did she seem more fragile, without it? Or in it? Here she is, there she was, naked and pale. Defenseless. A fortress. A woman. Lost, still, but yours, too. For a night.

A night’s enough, you decided.

You tumbled together onto the couch. Armor discarded all around you, you lost yourselves together.

 

In your dreams, you stand back to back with her. You fight bad guys. Whiplash, Justin Hammer’s drones, Extremis-powered flunkies, Ultron. Then you fight other heroes.

In your dreams, you fight your way out of AIM without a suit. You fight your way out together, Tony armed with shit she cobbled together at a hardware store and you with a gun you picked off a body. You jump, kick, spring, _run_. You have legs, in the dream. Legs you can use. On your own two feet you fight your way out.

It becomes harder to tell what hurts more: sleeping or waking.

 

You don’t sleep with the Starktech every night. This means that some nights, you jerk awake and try to swing yourself to the edge of the bed to sip some water and shake off nightmares, and in the space between dreams and reality, you forget. On these nights, you fall to floor. You have to use your arms to pull yourself up again. Your legs are—hamburger meat. Five surgeries, Tony said. Saved what they could. Tech for the rest. What the fuck good does that do you, alone on the floor in the middle of the night.

One of these nights, someone cries out when you fall. “Shit, Rhodey! Are you okay?”

Tony’s got her hands in your armpits. She’s hoisting you back onto the edge of the bed. You’re not much help. You scowl at her to cover the immensity of your gratitude. You look away as if this will prevent her seeing your shame.

“Were you watching me sleep?” you ask.

“Guilty,” she says, looking it. “I had a nightmare. I didn’t want to be alone.”

“New York again?”

Tony nods. This is what trauma does: it remakes you. Down to the fundamental building blocks of life. She was carbon once, mostly water, a bit of skin; she’s made of something different now. Guilt, responsibility, and a neural network that links her to the suit. No matter how much better she gets, how much therapy she does, how far apart her panic attacks stretch, this is the truth of it: she’s not the same as she was. She won’t be.

Maybe it’s like that. With your—legs.

She sits on your bed next to you and leans her head on her shoulder, lets the war drain out of her for a minute or two. These are the moments where she’s the most like herself, for good or for ill. “Look at us,” you say, feeling close to her. “Just like a fairy tale. You’re traumatized, I’m paralyzed. Happy ever after.”

“Hey, you said it. That’s the first time.”

“What?”

“You know what. I’ve been waiting, you know. For you to say it out loud.”

This frustrates you. Your reply is a snap. “Tony, you’re not _healing_ me. Okay? That’s not what this is. This is not an after school special where you nurse me back to health.”

She laughs, turns to bite the bare skin of your shoulder gently, and grins up at you over all those teeth. “Can it be premium cable instead?” Her hand slips onto your thigh, her fingers dipping dangerous, crosshatching what you can feel and what you can’t. “Ooh, Game of Thrones. Want it to be Game of Thrones?”

You say it again. It is a copper word, static-flavored. She’s right: you haven’t, before now. Said it. “ _Paralyzed._ ”

Tony kisses the imprint of her own teeth on your dark skin. “Just like a fairy tale,” she murmurs. “What do you think happened to those princesses, anyway? Like it’s easy, fighting your way out of a tower. They got _fucked up_ , James. Everyone with something to fight for eventually gets fucked up.”

Your voice is splintered, tears as much as anything. “I can’t feel my legs,” you whisper.

And Tony says, “I know.”

Tony says, “Want to find out what you can still feel?”

You’re nodding. You’re crying, your face rumpled and ruined with it, but you’re nodding.

Tony slips to her knees, nudges your legs open with her hands, strokes the skin and muscle and nothing up and down your inner thighs. She shows you both where the borders are, shows you both the invisible lines drawn by twisted, strangled nerves. “I’ll show you,” she kisses into your thighs, moving higher and higher til you can feel her lips. Oh, you can feel them. “I’ll show you what we can feel,” she murmurs. Her voice vibrates all the way up inside you.

She moves higher still.

You feel it.

 

Morning, and in the lag between dream and reality, you don’t try to stand. You just roll over, bury your nose into her short gelled hair. You keep your eyes closed, enjoy the moment. She wakes up humming, nuzzles back into you.

You can’t stay in bed all day, not when Tony’s head of the Avengers Academy and you’ve got physical therapy to do. She barks out commands to Friday and paces in front of twelve TV screens and browser windows, creating in thin air the constant stream of information she feeds into her whirling brain. Tony does all this, and you drag yourself up and down the rails, strapped into your leg sheaths and learning to walk again.

You get tired. You start to shake. You want more. You always wanted more, wanted the most. They gave you the sky and it still wasn’t enough. Then you wanted to be a superhero.

Lately, you’re learning about consequences.

One shaky step beyond the bars, the sheaths holding you up, taking your weight. Your brain scrambles with the newly learned sets of neural commands. It’s different, talking to a machine, than talking to your own bones and muscles and blood. Tony says it gets easier.

Another step, another. Three steps, and then you fall. (Falling—you will remember falling for the rest of your days. For once you’re in no hurry to take to the skies again.)

You fall, and Tony’s there to help you up.

She draws near you now, and your skin lights up, a collage of memory. All the times and places you’ve touched. You remember your first kiss. You were twenty years old. You’d never been kissed before, not by a woman. Not by anyone who counted. You came home from classes and there was a little black Audi parked outside your dorm. Leaning against it, small and fierce, was Tony Stark. She’d loomed large in your mind since the weapons demonstration. You’d been thinking about how it felt, talking to her. Talking to her instead of breathing. Standing near her. Smelling her. Flirting, but not touching… Guiltily, furtively, you’d been remembering.

“Uh, Miss Stark,” you stammered out. You were frozen at the sight of her, your keys half fumbled into your hand. She marched right up to you, got on her tiptoes, and kissed you on the mouth. You were too shocked to move. She touched a hand, so light and warmed and unlike metal, to the back of your head; she swept your lips with her tongue and your mouth opened, unlocked so easily, unlocked like all this time she held the key.

“Call me Tony,” she said, grinning, pulling back breathless. “Listen, did you get my missile? The Peacekeeper?”

Your brain was scrambled spinning. “Yes?” was all you could say.

“Great. So I can come up?”

If your brain was spinning, imagine what the rest of you was doing. Your ability to think completely hijacked by the heat and heartbeat below your waist, you nodded dumbly.

“Happy! Come back in the morning. I’ll be a while,” she called to her driver. Then Tony took the keys out of your hand and led you both inside.

Now, kneeling beside you on the floor, Tony takes your hand again. “You got this, Rhodes. We’ll figure it out,” she says.

You interrupt her. You’re surprised to feel a smile on your own face. “This sucks, T. This is a bad beat. But it hasn’t changed my mind. What we were fighting for—what we’re doing. It’s the right thing.”

You smile up at Tony from the floor. She takes your hand, helps you stand. You put your weight on her shoulder. Together, you learn to walk.

You think you’ve finally found her.


End file.
